Welcome to the Tyler Lab in the Social Psychology Program at NYU

Research

My research group is concerned with a variety of issues broadly related to the dynamics of authority within groups, organizations, and societies. As psychologists, our particular interest is in the factors that shape people's motivations when they are dealing with others in group settings.

Because justice has been found to be especially important to people's motivation when dealing with others, we study social justice. In particular, our work focuses on the psychology of procedural justice - the fairness of group rules and processes. Research consistently finds that people are strongly influenced by their assessments of procedural justice when they are evaluating authorities and institutions.

Law and Regulation

Research

I explore the motivations that lead people to cooperate when they are within groups. There are two aspects of such cooperation. First, there is deference to authority. The study of regulation is generally concerned with understanding why people accept the decisions made by others. Legitimacy, the quality of being viewed as being entitled to be obeyed, is consistently linked to exercising authority in fair ways.

Because of its implications for regulation, my work has always shared a connection with the concerns of the field of law. The question of how to manage undesirable behavior is central to the work of legal authorities, and I examine the motivations that shape people's rule-related behavior.

My primary book on this topic (Tyler, 2006) establishes the key role of legitimacy in shaping obedience to the law. That finding is important to bringing psychology into social regulation, since the study of law-related behavior had been dominated by economics analysis linking behavior to sanctions. My work shows that people will also take one the responsibility for obeying the law when asked to do so by a legitimate authority. In other words, people become self-regulatory. The further finding in my work that procedural justice is a key antecedent of legitimacy has led to a literature on procedural justice in legal institutions and in interactions with legal authorities.

The findings of this book have been widely cited within law. They are important because the question of how to motivate compliance with law and legal rules is central to many areas of law and these findings therefore have wide applicability. Recent applications include the study of commitment hearings in mental hospitals, people's reactions to mass tort settlements, the emergence of international law, and the popularity of mediation hearings.

Tyler, T.R., and Huo, Y.J. (2002). Trust in the law: Encouraging public cooperation with the police and courts. N.Y.: Russell-Sage Foundation.

My most recent contribution to this literature is my book Trust in the Law (Tyler and Huo, 2002) which explores deference to legal authorities among minorities. This book builds upon the earlier book Why People Obey the Law and again shows that procedural justice is a key antecedent of deference and of legitimacy. However, in Trust in the Law, ethnic group differences are more directly addressed. This book argues that legal authorities can build on the strong procedural justice findings I outline in my work to create a new model of regulation. I refer to that model as process-based regulation.

Trust in the Law is based on a sample of interviews with White, African-American, and Hispanic residents of these two cities. The focus of the study is on people's voluntary acceptance of decisions made by legal authorities. The results show that people's willingness to defer to legal authorities is shaped by two social motivations: procedural justice and motive-based trust. This finding suggests that authorities have considerable ability to gain deference from community members by treating them in ways that encourage judgments that the procedures used are fair and the motives underlying actions are benevolent. The study indicates that treating people with dignity and respect heightens both of these judgments.

Trust and confidence in the police and courts

A second project using this approach explores people's overall trust and confidence in the legitimacy of the police and the courts. This set of studies is concerned with the way that the average community resident makes evaluations of legal authorities, irrespective of whether they have had a personal experience with those authorities. Again, the question I am concerned with is the degree to which process issues shape public evaluations. A contrasting view is that often associated with the NYPD and its aggressive policing policies. That view is that the middle class is primarily interested in crime reduction and accepts the occurrence of unfair treatment toward, at least, minorities in the service of that goal. Several studies of mine suggest that this belief is not correct. In a reanalysis of previously collected surveys, I showed that people's evaluations of the police and courts are heavily influenced by procedural justice based judgments.

Recently, I have been studying public views about the police and policing activities a sample of New Yorkers will be interviewed this summer about their views on the police, as well as about their personal experiences with police officers through interviews over the telephone with New Yorkers.

Why do these interviews? We live in the midst of difficult and changing times. The events of September 11th highlight the risks of terrorism in America, while recent budget reductions make clear that we are living in a time of fiscal limits. No agency is more strongly affected by these changes than the New York City Police Department. To most effectively manage policing activities during these changing times, we need to have a clear understanding of how the public views the police. It is for this reason that we are conducting interviews with the residents of different neighborhoods in New York City. The interviews provide valuable feedback to those managing the police department and the city about public views regarding the activities of the NYPD. To this end, I have been conducting surveys of the residents of New York to better understand how people feel about policing services in their neighborhoods.

Anti-terror policing

I am currently studying how policing tactics are experienced among Islamic Americans, the targets of anti-terror policing. My argument is that cooperation from the community diminishes when people feel that they are being singled out for unfair policing activities. To understand the experiments of members of the community I am conducting interviews in Brooklyn and London.

Policy initiatives

The Administrative Office of the Courts in California has launched a five year initiative on Procedural Fairness in the California Courts. The goal is to redesign the courts with an eye toward procedural justice.

The Russell Sage Foundation created a working group on legitimacy in the criminal justice system which produced a volume on the issue of legitimacy as it influences policing in societies around the world. That volume is titled Legitimacy and Criminal Justice.

I have presented several lectures on legitimacy in the criminal justice system. The first was the Montesquieu Lecture at Tilburg University. I also presented the keynote address at the European Society of Criminology and gave the Reckless/Dinitz Memorial Lecture at Ohio State University. The general theme of these presentations is the need to shift the focus of criminal justice toward creating and maintaining legitimacy.

Readings on law and regulation

Tyler, T.R. (1988). What is procedural justice?: Criteria used by citizens to assess the fairness of legal procedures. Law and Society Review, 22, 103-135.

MacCoun, R.J., and Tyler, T.R. (1988). The basis of citizens' preferences for different forms of criminal jury. Law and Human Behavior, 12, 333-352.

Tyler, T.R., Casper, J.D., and Fisher, B. (1989). Maintaining allegiance toward political authorities: The role of prior attitudes and the use of fair procedures. American Journal of Political Science, 33, 629 - 652.

Tyler, T.R., and Boeckmann, R. (1997). Three strikes and you are out, but why? The psychology of public support for punishing rule breakers. Law and Society Review, 31, 237-265.

Tyler, T.R. (1998). Public mistrust of the law: A political perspective. University of Cincinnati Law Review, 66, 847-876.

Tyler, T.R., and Darley, J. (2000). Building a law-abiding society: Taking public views about morality and the legitimacy of legal authorities into account when formulating substantive law. Hofstra Law Review, 28, 707-739.

Tyler, T.R. (2001). Public trust and confidence in legal authorities: What do majority and minority group members want from the law and legal authorities? Behavioral Science and the Law, 19, 215-235.

Tyler, T.R. (2001). Trust and law abiding behavior: Building better relationships between the police, the courts, and the minority community. Boston University Law Review, 81, 361-406.

Tyler, T.R. (2002). A national survey for monitoring police legitimacy. Justice research and policy, 4, 71-86.

Sunshine, J., and Tyler, T.R. (2003). The role of procedural justice and legitimacy in shaping public support for policing. Law and Society Review, 37, 555-589.

Sunshine, J., and Tyler, T.R. (2003). Moral solidarity, identification with the community, and the importance of procedural justice. Social Psychology Quarterly, 66, 153-165.

Tyler, T.R. (2009). Procedural justice, identity and deference to the law: What shapes rule following in a period of transition? Australian Journal of Psychology, 61, 32-39.

The Psychology of Justice

I am interested in understanding why people care about and react to their evaluations of the fairness or unfairness of procedures. The procedural justice effect has emerged as a robust and compelling one, with people shown to react to how decisions are made in a wide variety of groups, organizations, and societies.

In early studies, I looked at psychological models of the justice motive, and argued that people are concerned about issues of identity and status. Further, I suggested that people use the justice of procedures to tell them about their status and to evaluate the degree to which they want to define their identity in terms of groups to which they belong (Lind and Tyler, 1988; Tyler and Lind, 1992).

This idea unfolds in my work two ways. First, in the finding that people care about the fairness of procedures more than about the favorability or fairness of outcomes. Early justice research focused primarily on issues of equity (outcome fairness) on the assumption that outcomes are the key issue. My work helped to shift the focus to issues of procedure by showing the importance of procedural justice judgments.

Second, my work helped to establish that people do not view procedures in instrumental terms, i.e. as a way to obtain outcomes. That view is explicit in the classic work on procedural justice by John Thibaut and Laurens Walker (1975). Instead, procedures are valued because they communicate status and inclusion in groups (Lind and Tyler, 1988). This distinction between instrumental and value-expressive or relational motivations underlying procedural justice effects has transformed the way that psychologists think about the meaning and implications of procedural justice findings.

I have extended this line of thinking to the study of authority relations (Tyler and Lind, 1992) arguing that people view group authorities as representatives of the group, and are therefore sensitive to how those authorities exercise their authority. Using fair procedures to exercise authority both communicates that the people one is dealing with are respected by the group, and it suggests that the group is one that is worth identifying with and being involved in.

Most recently, my work has sought to understand the relationship between justice and identity. I view justice as a key issue that people focus on when trying to define themselves and their relationship to their group.

Tyler, T.R., Degoey, P., and Smith, H. (1996). Understanding why the justice of group procedures matters: A test of the psychological dynamics of the group-value model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 913-930.

Tyler, T.R. (1989). The psychology of procedural justice: A test of the group value model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 830 - 838.

Smith, H.J., and Tyler, T.R. (1996). Justice and power: Can justice motivations and superordinate categorizations encourage the advantaged to support policies which redistribute economic resources and encourage the disadvantaged to willingly obey the law? European Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 171-200.

Smith, H.J., and Tyler, T.R. (1997). Choosing the right pond: The influence of the status of one's group and one's status in that group on self-esteem and group-oriented behaviors. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 146-170.

Multiculturalism

The dynamics of authority are central to all models of governance. Hence, my work on the basis of deference to authorities has been important in discussions about how to govern society.

In particular, I have written about the problems associated with governance in diverse, multicultural, societies. As I noted above, Trust in the Law discusses issues of diversity and multiculturalism as those issues are important to the rules of law.

Cooperation in Groups/Management:

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rocedural justice encourages people to involve themselves in groups by engaging in voluntary cooperative actions to help the group. This is true in communities, with government, and in work settings. Tyler and Blader (2000) examine this connection in work settings, showing that employees are strongly influenced by the fairness of group decision-making procedures.

My work also connects with the field of organizational behavior in schools of management. It has been widely demonstrated that many key work-related behaviors (job performance, absenteeism, turnover, sabotage, etc.) are shaped by the procedural justice of the workplace. As in other arenas, management theory has been dominated by models that root human motivation in incentives and sanctions. Hence, this demonstration that there are broader motivations on which managers can draw has been widely noticed. In particular, discussions about work increasingly recognize the importance of motivating voluntary (extra-role) behavior in workers. This type of behavior is especially poorly motivated by incentives and sanctions. As a consequence, the social psychological model must become more central to our understanding of work related behaviors.

My recent work seeks to develop a framework within which to understand motivation in work settings. I have conducted interviews with a sample of employees in New York companies (Tyler and Blader, 2000) and have studied corporate bankers in a large multinational firm. At this time, I am conducting a panel study of a sample of American workers through Knowledge Networks. My goal in this work is to develop arguments about the impact of work climate on the behavior of those within them. Instead of stressing mechanisms of accountability linked to rewards and punishments, my basic argument is that those employees who are treated fairly by their superiors will be motivated to perform well on their jobs.

Papers:

Tyler, T.R., and Degoey, P. (1995). Collective restraint in a social dilemma situation: The influence of procedural justice and community identification on the empowerment and legitimacy of authority. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 482-497.